Life

She's on a flight from Freud

Bruno Schlumberger / Canwest News Service

After being featured in a January issue of The New York Times Magazine, sex researcher Meredith Chivers received a barrage of more than 200 emails, many from women thanking her for helping to validate their experiences.

Searching online recently for a used piano, Meredith Chivers found what looked like a good prospect. She emailed the seller and was taken aback by his response. Meredith Chivers? he asked. That Meredith Chivers?

The man had seen the Jan. 25 cover story of The New York Times Magazine. Titled “What Do Women Want?” it featured extensive coverage of the groundbreaking work being done by sex researcher Meredith Chivers, a scientist who is carving out an international reputation as an expert in the field of female sexuality. And yes, the piano buyer was that Meredith Chivers.

Chivers, 36, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., laughs as she recounts the tales of people’s reactions to her line of work. Travelling by plane to conferences on sexuality, she used to share that information in conversations with curious seatmates.

“But it was like opening a Pandora’s box. Now I just tell people I study cognitive science. They go, ‘Ooh, sounds really interesting,’ and that’s the end of it.”

What do women want? Chivers and a small group of other female researchers around the world are finally reconsidering the question, suggesting possible answers. Their work is attracting attention, and sometimes controversy, wherever it appears, and Chivers has become one of the field’s go-to experts.

“It’s been weird,” Chivers says. “To have this kind of recognition so young is odd, I think.”

The Ottawa native, who is attractive and personable and nothing at all like the “science geek” she calls herself, will assume the prestigious position of Queen’s National Scholar in April.

Her résumé features master’s and doctoral degrees from Chicago’s Northwestern University, research and clinical experience in Chicago and at Toronto’s renowned Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and an eye-popping array of academic honours and awards. She sits on the editorial boards of three respected journals, including Archives of Sexual Behavior, the world’s leading publication in the field.

Even without reference to the content of her work, she is undeniably hot stuff. And the reaction to January’s New York Times Magazine feature has only turned up the heat. “It was overwhelming,” she says. “I had more than 200 emails in response to the article.”

Many were from women who wanted to express gratitude to Chivers for her work, which they felt validated their experiences. But many were also from documentary filmmakers, literary agents and publishers, though she is putting them off for now.

Chivers conducts her experiments — testing volunteer subjects’ degrees of arousal to visual and auditory sexual stimuli — in a small, dimly lit room that locks from the inside. If the test subjects are women (she has also studied male sexuality), they are asked to undress from the waist down and insert a wired measuring device resembling a tampon. Then they relax on a reclining chair to watch movies or images on a monitor in front of them.

“People kind of get this Stanley Kubrick idea from A Clockwork Orange,” Chivers says, “but it’s not like that at all.”

The arousal measuring machine is called a plethysmograph, relatively recently adapted for women, though a male version — employing a device like a rubber band — has been around for decades. Chivers’s subjects record their own conscious reactions by means of a lever or keypad, and the devices record physiological reactions by measuring the increase in genital blood flow (or, for men, the girth of the penis).

In Chicago, she worked with Northwestern University professor Michael Bailey, former chairman of the psychology department, looking, among other things, at the question of bisexuality and co-authoring a paper on arousal patterns in bisexual men. The findings sparked controversy, since they were presented in media reports to suggest that bisexual men were really homosexual. Chivers says the reports were reductionistic and sensationalist. Sexual orientation, she says, is a complex motivational force that consists of far more than a collection of arousal responses.

But she does think there is far more true bisexuality among women, where “there’s a lot more blurring of the lines.” Chivers believes exclusively lesbian women may be fairly rare, and that many lesbians still find themselves attracted to men as well as women.

Bailey, who was Chivers’s mentor during her graduate and postgraduate studies, calls her “a bold thinker — not constrained by what others thought.”

For instance, she believes that, contrary to cultural stereotype, women are generally aroused by any portrayal of sexual activity — heterosexual, homosexual, even non-human (she has shown images of mating apes) — no matter what their orientation, even though they don’t always admit to it. Men, on the other hand, tend to be aroused by images that address their specific orientation.

But she refines that further. While previous research had suggested there were no differences in arousal patterns between lesbian and heterosexual women, Chivers discovered that there were. When sexual activity involving couples was portrayed, arousal patterns were similar. But when solitary sexual activity was shown — individuals masturbating, for instance — lesbian women responded more to images of individual women than to the images of individual men.

From this, Chivers draws the preliminary conclusion that, as the level of portrayed sexual activity increases, it trumps personal orientation. Furthermore, it might suggest that lesbian women, to some degree, have a response pattern more typical of men, whose arousal patterns reflect their orientation.

“My hope in doing this work,” she says, “is that I can educate women about their sexuality, and that I can figure out some of the tougher questions.”

She has various lines of research she’s pursuing at the moment. Among them are studies analyzing the conscious and unconscious disconnect she’s observed in women’s arousal responses, sexuality in postpartum women and in cancer survivors, and a question so immense it might intimidate less scientific minds. She wants to understand nothing less than “what it is that makes people sexual.”

“I never felt uncomfortable talking about sex,” Chivers admits. She recalls a favour she did for male classmates at her Catholic high school in Trenton, Ont. The guys were desperate for details, so she drew them diagrams of the female anatomy, specifically the location of the clitoris.

In a Catholic school? “Yeah,” she laughs. “But it’s even worse. It was during religion class.”

During an undergraduate course in human sexuality at the University of Guelph, she had to conduct an hour-long seminar on female sexual problems.

“I’ve never been a really comfortable public speaker, but I felt really good about what I was doing. ... Afterward, I remember thinking, ‘If I could do this for the rest of my life, I’d be a pretty happy person.’ ”